Algebra Team: Inside Ms. Warburton's Class

Algebra Team - Inside Ms. Warburtons' Class with Marlo Warburton
[01:00:16;26]
Marlo: I like to think of my classroom, my work, as love and order.
"My first announcement is "Thank you for your sweetness!"
When you walk into my classroom, I hope that what you observe is people being kind to each other, and people enjoying the content of what they're learning. And also things going very smoothly. It's very structured, very tidy, um, my systems are clear. I like my classroom to be very predictable.
"Good morning Pam."
Student: "Good morning Ms. Warburton."
Marlo: "Good morning Nandi."
Student: "Good morning Ms. Warburton."
Marlo: "Good morning Sam."
The beginning of class is really important to me, and so the first thing I do when students enter is I greet them, each at the door, and I'm holding a sign that says "I heart a silent start". It's one of the things that I do to try to get a good start to the class period, so that I can maximize my minutes.
"Alright class, I heart a silent start. I also heart a quick start. So, by this time, you should have your warm-up begun."
Students come in and they get to work on the warm-up.
"Everybody needs to produce a red pen now. We're going to score your warm-up."
They do an assignment. We go over it, and then they score in red pen.
"Red pens ready?"
Student: "I got negative 15x, plus..."
Marlo: Two stars means I got it right by myself on the first try.
Students: "Yes."
Marlo: "it works. Please score number one."
Student: "And then, I got 1x..."
Marlo: One star means I didn't get it right the first time, but after seeing the answer, I went back, I made corrections in red pen. I now get it."
"Bingo! Yes, it does. Please score number two."
And, an 'x' means I didn't get it. I still don't get it. I need help on this problem.
"Please score number three."
I have the scoring system because I want students to learn from mistakes. It isn't that I want them to just mark right or wrong for no reason. I want them to actually know when they're wrong and learn from that.
"I need you to open your notes to the table of contents, and prepare to write today's title. It is a new lesson, and I think you're gonna like it."
Today I introduced factoring, so students learned how to, instead of multiplying two binomials to get a product, they learned how to take a product and figure out what two binominals might have been multiplied to get that product.
"How do you multiply to make 60?"
Student: "Ten times 6."
Marlo: "Ten times 6 would be one way. A different way?"
Student: "Thirty times 2."
Marlo: "Yes. Another way?"
I wanted them to see that it's not obvious necessarily what the factors are. And sometimes we need to guess and check, and play with it a bit til we find factors that work.
"So keep going."
One of the norms in my classroom is that confusion leads to learning. In fact, I have a quote on the wall that says "If you're not confused, you're not learning."
"This may take some guessing and checking until you get it right."
I want students to expect confusion. I don't want them to expect things to come easily all the time. Um, I want them to expect that there's gonna be some struggle, and then they get passed that. They figure it out, and that's called learning.
"Looking good. Team talk."
Student: "But, then that would be 3x squared."
Marlo: Last week, we started a new school motto called Tiger Up! We're the tigers, at our school, and Tiger Up! means the opposite of giving up.
Student: "This is confusing."
Student: "Yeah."
Student: "This is really confusing."
Marlo: When students are given some sort of challenge, and they feel frustrated or want to give up, we can say "You need to Tiger Up!"
"First I want to see how well you're doing with your struggle time, how much you are Tigering Up."
We're not so much interested in how quickly students understand something, or how easy it is for them. We're more interested in how willing they are to take on new things because that's really where learning happens.
"You can struggle and struggle and struggle and figure things out."
Once students start to see challenges as non-threatening, and as fun as something to enjoy, then math becomes more fun. If you think that hard means bad, then you're not gonna enjoy very much in life, in general, um let alone math. But, if you think that challenges are good, um, then you're gonna like everything that you do.